Startitis

With the big sock yarn blanket project out of the way I've got time again for other things (not that having a big project to work on normally would stop me from working on other projects, but for some reasons I was fairly monogamistic with the blanket, which is pretty unusual for me)

Anyway, since the sock yarn blanket is done, I've made not one but two pairs of wristwarmers. One pair I've got no photo handy, the other pair is here.


The pattern is a freebie by Hanne Falkenberg, a danish designer. I got a copy of the pattern in my favorite yarn store in Dresden and had to cast on right away. Super fast knit and lovely end products.

Then I'm ready to tackle the replacement of my mom's favorite socks. I've made them in November 2007 and already got them back for repair once. This time though, I decided to knit the same socks again in another color.

First one's done and it does fit, so I'm off onto the second one.

After my recent burst of Wollmeise aquicions I thought it might be a good idea to knit with some of it. Though, to be honest, I also would have liked to leave the skeins alone in their unearthly lovelyness. It's sort of a 'eating the cake / keeping the cake' thing.
Anyway, I cast on Spectra by Stephen West. The bluish yarn is the Wollmeise 100% Merino in the color Silberdistel (Silver Thistle), the other a skein of Noro Silk Garden Sock Yarn I happened to have in my stash. Love - LOVE - this combination.
And, finally, I did cast an for Cria a lovely little cardigan by Ysolda out of her book 'Little Red In The City'. It's a top down cardigan with set-in arms, only you don't sew in the arms in the end, but knit them as you go. Simply brilliant. I'm not 100% sure on the yarn (Rowan Revive in the color basalt), though. To begin with, the gauge is way off, so I'm following the pattern for a much smaller size. Also, the yarn is pretty rough to knit with (though it does soften a lot once it's been washed). And it smells. And I'm not sure I have enough.
Ah well, I will see.

Blanket of Many Colors and Yarns

In May, I started turning my sock yarn left overs into something useful.
I picked a pattern from Drops and began to crochet small sqares from all the little balls of sockyarn, which have accumulated over the years. I made squares in blue, in green, red, orange, grey, brown, pink, yellow and any combination thereof. When a ball got too small for a full square, I combined it with others to make multicolored patches (up to five colors sometimes).

After getting 512 patches together (long since I had run out of my own scrapes and asked for and received donations from friends), I started to crochet them all together, using some off-white sock yarn I had in my stash. I had four skeins, but this was not enough, I needed a fifth one, which luckily was found in a friends yarn basket.
I didn't follow any particular order, only made sure that not two identical colors ended up next to each other.
I still need to wash the blanket and lightly block it. I hope that stops the curling on the edges.

Technical info:
material - sockyarn, about 2 kg I think
Regia 4ply, Regia hand-dyed, Regia Cotton, Colinette Jitterbug, Wollmeise 100%, Opal Hand-Painted, Gründle, Noro Sock Yarn, Lana Grossa Meilenweit, Schoppelwolle Admiral, Zitron Trekking Hand Art, Schoppel Zauberball, Mark & Kattens Fame Trend, Lang Yarns Jawoll Magic, ....

Crochet hook - 2.5 mm and 3 mm

Pattern - Crochet DROPS blanket in ”Delight” and ”Fabel” for the squares, the rest I sort made up as I went

Size - about 200 x 220 cm

Final thoughts - I just can't quite express how much I love this blanket. Colors I never thought would go together are happily next to each other and the whole thing is just amazing.

Baby Surprise Jacket

I don't know why I don't knit more baby stuff. There are only advantages.

A) you don't need much yarn. You can pick a ball or two (or three) and for a little bit of money you get enough material for a complete project. Not like a jacket for myself which is really quite a bit of an investment.
The yarn below I scored at I Knit in London. At this time I didn't know if it would be a boy or girl, so I went with something fairly neutral.


B) Knitting something for a baby is usually a very quick knit. The Baby Surprise Jacket (aka BSJ) by Elizabeth Zimmerman is a hugely popular pattern for it's fast and fun (and really a bit surprising - that woman was a genius). There are more than 16000 projects for this pattern on Ravelry as of today. It took me one weekend to finish. It's still missing buttons, though.

C) Finished projects are super cute and one has the sudden urge to find a random baby to put the jacket on.

And there lies the problem (that's why I don't to more of that stuff). I have a certain lack of babies around me. And I don't see how this will change in the near future.
Ah well, back to knitting stuff for myself. How much yarn do I need for this .....?

Three Guesses

... on where I've been. 'London'?
Damn, you're good.
I took a quick trip to visit a friend, do some sightseeing and watch a couple of shows.
On the first day I've rode the London Eye and got a great view on Parlament and Big Ben.I then walked down to the Tower Bridge.On the second day I then visited the Queen.I also went to see two shows: 'We Will Rock You' and 'War Horse'.

I saw 'We Will Rock You' a couple of years ago in Köln and enjoyed it a lot. It's one of those musicals with an abandonce of energy that will have you dancing in the aisles at the end. Loved it.

'War Horse', on the other hand, is a bit more serious. It's based on a children's book by Michael Morpurgo, showing the horrors of World War I through a horse's point of view. The play was excellent and I was blown away by the puppetry (or 'horse choreography' as they called it) which was used to bring the horses to life. The play has won quite a few awards, and rightly so.

Berlin, Berlin (again)

It's been a while since the last time I've went to Berlin. Of course, this time I just had to pick one of the hottest days this year to go.

Still, the sights were something to see, so sightseeing I did.

Brandenburger Tor

I actually wondered if I ever walked through it before or not. This time, I did.

Reichstag (no, I didn't get inside. You have to reserve well in advanced)

Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (or, short, the Holocaust-Memorial)

Die Siegessäule

In the Pergamonmuseum, the Market Gate of Miletus

One of the lions on the wall of the Gates of Babylon. The colors and details of those is absolutely amazing.

And finally (but certainly not least), a very different tower … A Ritter Sport Chocolate Tower (though, to be honest, this is only a mock up, but one can wish … and, I think there was enough chocolate in that place to make it real)

I haven't seen half of what I wanted to see and done half of what I wanted to do, so I guess another visit to Berlin will happen soon(ish)

Meisenwahn

There are few yarns in the knitting world that cause a hype such as those sold by the Wollmeise. A couple of years ago it was still possible to simply go online and order the yarns in the colors you wanted – you could even ask for different shades (light/medium/dark).

Nowadays, you have to be there (online) right on time when the weekly job update happens on Friday mornings. Still, there’s a good change that between the time you manage to put a skein in the color you want into your shopping basket and the time after you dug your credit card out of your purse in the living room, the skein will not be available anymore. This has let to skeins being sold on ebay for ridicules amounts of money. On Ravelry, skeins of Wollmeise being offered in trade are gone within seconds. People downright horde skeins. “My precious” is heard more than once as proud owners cradle their skeins. One might get the impression they are made of gold.

Other than buying online, there are very few places you actually can go and buy this yarn. Here in Germany there is a brick and mortar store in Pfaffenhofen (close to Munich), but this is only open every other weekend or so, which makes going there a little bit difficult for the average working stiff. Except, once per year (I think), the shop is open for a whole week. However, you can’t buy the regular yarn during that week, but only second choice, the ‘unlucky fellows’ (aka ‘Unglücksraben’) that didn’t quite made the cut, may it because the color didn’t quite come out the way they should have, or because there are knots in the skeins, or because the skeins are under weight.

Still, even with those little flaws, the yarn is still very, very pretty.

So, on Thursday, on my way from Frankfurt to Dresden, I took a little detour. What is 300km for some Wollmeise yarn, really? I know of people who fly from the US just to shop there (though, I guess, usually they try to sell it to their family as a jolly good vacation in the lovely country of Germany).

I arrived around 2pm in Pfaffenhofen and quickly found my way to the store. Overwhelmed by wool fumes and assaulted by pretty colors I stumbled back out 45 min later, a good part of my money gone, but with 10 skeins of sock yarn in blues, green, red, honey and white and 2 skeins of lace yarn in blue.

For the lace yarn I plan on making another Featherweight cardigan and the sock yarn calls to being knit into a nice colorful blanket and/or maybe even into socks.

But for now, I’m going to sit next to my pretty new yarn any time I can and pet it a little bit now and then.

General Update

I've now got 329 patches for the scrap sock yarn blanket. I decided to put them together on a bias using off white sock yarn. The reason I picked the white is A) I have at least 4 skeins of it as I bought it a long time ago with the intention of dying it and B) the white is nicely neutral and doesn't swallow the other colors in the blanket. I gave it a try putting five rows together and I do like it a lot. It does curl a little bit at the corners, but I hope with some light blocking this will go away. The stripe is 200cm wide with 16 patches across.

I would love to go on putting those squares together, but as I still have about 150 - 180 patches more to make and I don't know what colors I'll end up with, I had to put a stop on it. It's just too much fun picking up a patch at (more or less) random and see how it goes with the others around it.

Those socks have been finished some time ago, but only now I got around to take the picture.

The yarn is Opal Handpainted in the colorway 'Asien' and the pattern is Spring Forward from an older issue of Knitty.I now wish I had made about a half repeat more on the leg section, but, well, it is what it is. Besides, the left over yarn is already used up in the blanket (you can even see one of the patches in the top picture)

Then, I pulled out my loom again and using up some yarn I bought because I liked the color very much (and it is still a great color), but when the yarn arrived I discovered that it is one of the most scratichest yarns I've ever got and certainly not usuable for socks (I think it was labeled a sock yarn, but I'm not sure now).

Anyway, I added some golden yarn to the mix and going to weave a piece of fabric I then plan to make into a small project bag.

Sockenwollerestedeckeupdate

Update on the scrap sockyarn blanket project.

Last Friday, I put all the patches I've made so far in one big pile and looked at it.

Looks like plenty, I thought.
Then I spread them out on the floor, in mostly random order, into a 15 x 16 patches retangular (plus 4 patches) and looked at it again.

First thought: Pretty!
Second thought: This is not enough, damn.
Measuring I get about 132 cm across the 15 patches, which is not quite the 180 x 220cm I'm aiming for.
*Sigh*
Back to the crocheting.

One question remains, though. My original plan was to crochet all those patches together using black sockyarn, but looking on the patches lying on the ground like this, I wonder if I should use something lighter in color. I'm thinking of an off-white or cream.
And suggestions?

Canada Vacation - Post 05 - Stuff

Just Stuff that somehow didn't fit into the other posts.

The streets of St. John's
The entrance to the harbour of St. John's (aka the Narrows)

Our ferry from Argentia to North Sydney

Moose advertisment:

Actual moose:

Canada Vacation - Post 04 - Birds

Seagulls, Puffins and Gannets, oh my!

Black-legged Kittiwakes:
Puffins:

And gannets:

Canada Vacation - Post 03 - Landscapes

Sometimes bad weather (as in wind and fog) has an advantage. Take a rocky coastline, add some atmospheric mist in the air. Some wind for the waves, and one has a fantastic picture.


Well, one of the reasons we went to Newfoundland was because the Northcoast is also known as 'Iceberg Alley' as during spring and early summer the icebergs that have broken off months ago from the glaciers in Greenland travel along the coast and can be seen from land. At least in theory. During the time we've been on the island, however, icebergs had been rather scarce. We only got about three and for two of thoe we had to take a boat tour.

The advantage of taking a boat tour is that you can get really close to the bergs and see details you just can't get from land.

One of the icebergs even had a guest.
One more typical picture.

Canada Vacation - Post 02 - Lighthouses

I've always have loved lighthouses. I'm not sure what it is that calls to me, but if I know there's a lighthouse somewhere I will try to get there and make a picture of it.

The first one pictured, is actually the last one I took a photo of. It is the lighthouse in Peggy's Cove and quite posibly the most fotographed lighthouse in Novo Scotia, is not in all of Canada. It was Canada Day (1st of July) and our last day in Canada. Luckily we arrived early enough to beat the crowds. The weather was brilliant and it was for the first time in three weeks we actually saw a clear blue sky.

This lighthouse (and the sky behind it) is more typical for what we had for most of the trip. It is the light house in Cow's Head on the West coast of Newfoundland.

This lighthouse is the one in Cape Spear, the Eastern most point in North America. Again is was foggy and the first sound we heard when we arrived there was the deep bass of the foghorn blowing every minute or so. This is actually the new lighthouse there, there's another historical building a few meters away that is the original lighthouse.

The funniest lighthouse (in my opinion) was this one in Bonavista. This is the more traditional style of lighthouses, where the lighthouse is actually more of a house for the lighthouse keeper and his family living on the premise. Today, all the lighthouses are automaticized (is that a word?), though, so no lighthouse keepers needed anymore.
This last building is obviously not a lighthouse. This is the Cabot Tower in St. John's, marking the place John Cabot on St. John's Day 1497 (24th June) set foot for the first time on North American soil.
This place is interesting for at least one more historical reason. It is the place where in 1901 Guglielmo Marconi received first wireless transatlantic signal from Cornwall in England, basically jump starting the modern communication age.

Canada Vacation - Post 01 - Nova Scotia

Some may have wondered why I haven't posted anything for the last three weeks (some may not have wondered, because they knew). I've been away on vacation to Canada. A friend and I rented a motorhome and went from Halifax to Newfoundland and back.

When we arrived in Halifax, the weather was great, nice and warm.

The Clocktower in Halifax:

We went down to the harbourfront and took a tour on the Harbour Hopper, going through downtown Halifax and then into the harbour itself.

Of course we also saw tugboat Theodore Too (isn't he just too cute - he got his own tv-show)

The next day we picked up our camper. It also had started to rain, which was pretty much the mode for the next 2 1/2 weeks. If it wasn't raining is was foggy or windy.

Compared to some others we saw on the road he was downright smallish, but for us he was just the right size. When we returned him, we had driven more than 5000 km.

Before heading to the ferry and up to Newfoundland, we drove along the Cabot Trail, a very beautiful strech of road on Cape Brenton Island.

From the trail we saw quite a few times fishermen pulling up lobster baskets full of yummy North Atlantic lobsters.

Of course, it didn't us long before the first lobster landed in our cooking pot (though, we didn't go for life lobster. I don't think either of us could have manage the kill the poor thing by drowning it in boiling water - we left that dirty job to others)